Of the many comrades and collaborators of Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, Librado Rivera was by far the closest. It was a revolutionary partnership that lasted twenty years, rivalling that of Durruti and Ascaso, ending only with Ricardo’s murder (directly or indirectly by the US authorities) in Leavenworth Federal Prison, Kansas. Librado, a founding member of the Partido Liberal Mexicano, was a man who made fundamental and major contributions to its anarchist orientation.

Librado, however, has been badly neglected on his own account, partly due to his own natural modesty and reticence. He always shunned the limelight while remaining at the same time in the forefront of the struggle, preferring to adopt the role of a seemingly ‘simple militant’. The reality was very different. A tireless anarchist revolutionary and propagandist, he spent more than thirty years fighting, as he would say, ‘for all the oppressed and exploited of the earth’ against injustice and ‘a new society which would have, as well as liberty, love and justice for all!

In addition to Dave Poole’s English text, the book contains many of Rivera’s most important articles, but unfortunately these are IN SPANISH ONLY.

A film dramatisation of John Reed‘s newspaper accounts of the Mexican Revolution. Considered the first real film in Mexican cinema to be made on the Mexican Revolution. John Reed, Harvard graduate and American journalist, became a socialist in the period running up to World War I. In 1913, he travelled to Mexico with his lover, Mabel Dodge, to report on the ongoing Mexican Revolution. In 1910, Francisco Madero, a wealthy landowner, seized control of the government, and overthrew General Porfirio Diaz. Failing to live up to his promises of land reform, Madero was challenged by the peasant leader Emiliano Zapata. Madero was assassinated by a group of rightist generals and replaced, ultimately, by the American-backed General Huerta who, in turn was challenged by Pancho Villa. For four months, Reed followed Villa on his march south from Texas through Chihuahua and south towards Torreon. Traveling in the company of peones, Reed got to know firsthand the people who supported Villa in his ultimate overthrow of the Mexican government. This FILM and BOOK tells Reed’s account of those four months. Reed left Mexico before Villa’s job was completed. After a short time in the United States, he travelled to Europe where he witnessed, first hand, the Russian Revolution.

ANARCHIST/LIBERTARIAN FILM ARCHIVE

To ensure our popular film site keeps running — we need donations of at least £130.00 a month (appx $200.00, €165.00). This is primarily to cover the costs of our broadband and heavy bandwidth usage. So far one committed supporter is contributing a regular £20.00 a month — are there any other generous donors out there? PAYPAL donations, please, to christie@btclick.com

Post calendar

Anarchism

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary